Latest Musescore offering on YouTube

• Jul 12, 2013 - 00:56

I've posted my latest on YouTube at http://youtu.be/mR-YvylT8F8

It's an arrangement of the Lefty Frizzell classic, Long Black Veil, for 2 fiddles, 2 mandolins, harp, guitar, and bass. A 3rd fiddle plays the vocal line. Of interest to Musescore users are the mandolins, which have to play both tremolo and straight, notated on the same staff. The actual Musescore instrument used was a C trumpet, which gave me two channels per staff, normal and mute. I altered the Instrument Text (long and short) to Mandolin, and used Staff Text to identify tremolo and straight-plucked passages. In LinuxSampler, I loaded 2 instruments per mandolin (trem. and straight), and switched between them by choosing Channel=>normal (straight) or Channel=>mute (tremolo) in the Staff Text Properties dialogue. As a last step, I made the Staff Text invisible.

An oddity of Musescore I've grown so used to I forget to mention it is that the Undo function, which I invoke with Ctl-z, doesn't work properly with respect to midi output. Example: I change a C4 to a G4, then decide to revert to C4. Ctl-z does the expected undo in the score, but the midi output still plays the G4. I have to make some other alteration in the score before I get my midi C4 back. Typically, I just move the offending note up and down a semitone. I'm wondering if anyone else has noticed this problem.

Lastly, does (v1.3) or will (v2.0) Musescore have the ability to engrave meterless music? I have a huge, 3-staff piano score that uses Messaien-like additive rhythms, with bar lines serving only as visual dividers. I've never had the patience to ink the whole thing, and the pencil I wrote it in is fading. Musescore is helping so much with my other fading manuscripts I'm hoping it can help with this, too.


Comments

If you do a search for "meterless" and maybe other similar terms, you'll find a number of threads discussing possible techniques. The gist of it is having one bar per line and settings its meter (actual or nominal) to the number of beats you want on that line, and hiding meters. You'll also see references to new features coming in 2.0 that will help.

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